people centered design - a bit discovery

just found this very informative blog:
http://peoplecentereddesign.net/

First time I came across the term 'people centered design' was in the conference in Beijing, I think one of the presenter was talking about the different among co-design, participantry design, user centered design, people centered design and a lot of other weird-named design approaches... well, this reminds me that I haven't got the time to read through that really thick conference procedings yet... eh... more readings, more readings...

Re-public's special issue: Innovative Service Design for All

I got a paper published on Re-public's special issue of their online journal: Innovative Service Design for All. The title of my article is 'Mind the Gap: Theories and practices in managing stakeholders in the service design process'.

All the articles are very interesting, two draws my attention especially:

Nicola Morelli's 'Beyond the experience: In search of an operative paradigm for the industrialisation of services' , which talks about the industrialisation of services in the public sector. Morelli says:

"The process of building the service starting from the customers’ experience can
be compared with a process of reverse engineering of such experience. The
experience is de-composed in elementary modules. A set of competences, knowledge and technologies is associated to each of those modules. [...] The
disaggregation of service systems in modular structures makes it possible to
shift the production process for those services from a centralised and vertical
logic to a decentralised and horizontal one."

This is very true in some of my case study experience, and also interestingly ties into the three themes of my findings: People, Process and Knolwedge. although mine still needs a bit thought-through ;-]

Soumitri Varadarajan proposed a design for the new university design programme of Service Design in India. A nice piece to read if you have the ambition to set up Service Design programme in your own university or maybe like what we do here in Dundee - integrate the elements of Service Design into the teaching of all kinds of design courses.

Service Design reading list

I was building up my Endnote database yesterday to get ready for writing up 'the big book' - yes, welcome to hell...

Not very surprisingly, my database covers a lot of management books, some design books, some experience books and couple of economic books... it makes me wonder if you are a Service Designer/student, what kind of books are you reading?

So here I would like to collect your comments on a reading list for people who are interested in Service Design and maybe want to do a bit reading for it. It would be great if you could spare 2 seconds recommend two books (or journal articles) you think every Service Designer should read - not have to be Design books, can be anything really!

Think I might kick off first here:
Bernd Schmitt, Customer Experience Management - not exactly a Service book or a Design book, but it presents a very interesting framework to build 'experience platform' which then spread the seeds of customer experience into different business functions.

Bill Hollins, Total Design. Perhaps also couple of his more recent books... to be honest, although I am not a big believer of standardisation, this little book does provid a nice flavour of the many other issues along with the design process that any development processes will have. Plus, it is a small book that doesn't look scary!

This list will go to our librarian for furture purchase and I will keep update the comments into this post here!

Alright, you turn now... Thank you in advance!

From Arne Van Oosterom (DesignThinkers):
Linked , Albert-László Barabási
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

From Tom Allen:
A summary of the past thirty years of service design literature. http://bit.ly/hHm0J

From Nick Marsh (Engine):
These are two pretty heavy going books that are worth getting:
http://www.choosenick.com/?action=view&url=two-non-design-service-design-books-every-service-designer-should-read
Here's more:
http://designforservice.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/books-for-service-designers/

From Deborah Szebeko (ThinkPublic):
The Tipping Point -Malcolm Galdwell
It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be – Paul Arden

From Ben Reason(Livework):
http://www.howardesign.com/exp/service/
Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawkin et al
Reassembling the Social - Bruno Latour

From Todd Johnston:
The Timeless Way of Building (Alexander),
Biomimicry (Benyus),
Out of Control (Kelly)

Lauren Tan:
I would recommend the Designing for Services reader that was distributed in the early stages of the project and also the report which combines reflections on the project from the designers, academics and the project leads (Lucy Kimbell and Victor Seidel).

Designing for Services - Multidisciplinary Perspectives: Proceedings from the Exploratory Project on Designing for Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises, Saïd Business School (2008) Edited by Lucy Kimbell and Victor P. Seidel

I would also highly recommend:
Boland, J., Collopy, F., Ed. (2005). Managing as designing. California, Stanford University Press.
This book is more general in terms of design in a business and management context but very helpful where ever design is crossing into other disciplines.

Richard Randolph:
• The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. This is the one that started it all.
• Experiential Marketing, by Bernd H. Schmitt
• The E Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What To Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
• Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound by Martin Lindstrom

Tom Kiehl:
My view is that good service design must balance customer satisifaction, profitability, and associate morale, particularly in businesses where front line associates are key to delivering service.
- Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right by Frances X. Frei, Harvard Business Review, April 2008
- Zero Defections, Quality Comes to Services by Frederick Reichheld and Earl Sasser, HBR, Sept-Oct 1990
- The Trader Joe's Adventure: Turning a Unique Approach to Business into a Retail and Cultural Phenomenon by Len Lewis
- Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success by Kevin Freiberg and Kevin Freiberg

James Samperi (Engine):
2 books which aren't focused on 'design' but any service 'designer needs to understand and know about. The latter book is comprehensive and pretty accessible - i can't vouch for the first but recommended by my colleague.
New Service Development and Innovation in the New Economy
From Products to Services: Insights and experiences from companies which have embraced the service economy.

Sarah Drummond:
simplicity- edward de bono
'In an increasingly complex world 'simplicity' is going to be a key value. The pace of change is not going to stop so we have to make a conscious effort to make things simpler.'

Marc Fonteijn(31VOLTS):
* The experience economy
* Subject to Change
* Everything is miscellaneous
* 10 faces of innovation
* The knowing-doing gap
And I second Sarah with simplicity as a must read

proto partners:
Wired to Care by Dev Patnaik and Pete Mortensen of Jump Associates,
The Loyalty Effect from Fred Reicheld

Lucy Kimbell:
Vargo, S. and R. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic in Marketing,” /Journal of Marketing, /68, 1-17
Vargo, Stephen L. and Lusch Robert (2008), "Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1), 1-10.

Jeff Howard:
John Thackara's book "In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World" and a bi-monthly magazine published in Los Angeles called "Good."
http://www.good.is/

Isaac Arthur:
Adaptive Path's 'Subject to Change' is the best all around service design book I've found,
Neumeier's 'Brand Gap' and 'Zag' are indispensable books for all designers, regardless of their specific discipline'
And a great article from NextD on design 3.0 (transferable philosophies and processes to service design)

Paul Thurston(ThinkPublic):
Designing Services with Innovation Methods

Garrick Wood:
'How Designers Think: The Process Demystified' by Bryan Lawson
'What Designers Know' by Bryan Lawson

Lorne Mithell:
One of the main folk I track in this area is John Seddon (Vanguard Consulting) who is visiting Professor at Cardiff University. He has adapted the Demming/Ohno Toyota Production System philosophy to Service Design in both the Private and, more recently, Public sectors. He is an excellent speaker as well. You can get his material at Vanguard Consulting - and you can see him on video at: http://www.vimeo.com/4670102

Bhavna Bahr
In the Bubble - John Thackara
Naked Brain - Richard Restak
Buyology - Martin Lindstorm
Why We Buy - Paco Underkill
The Hidden Dimension - Edward T Hall
How Customers Think - Gerald Zaltman
Universal Principles of Design
Ten Faces of Innovation - Tom Kelly
Visual Ethnography - Sarah Pink

Jonathan Norman:
Maybe too far off for your pusposes but we are publishing: Design for Services, edited by Dr Anna Meroni and Dr. Daniela Sangiorgi in March 2010

http://www.gowerpublishing.com/isbn/9780566089206

Birgit Mager
Touchpoint . The Journal of Service Design, Köln: Köln Interntional School of Design
Miettinen, Satu / Koivisto, Mikko (Hrsg.): 28Designing Services with Innovative Methods, Keuruu: Otava Book Printing,

what is Social Innovation?

Find this very interesting article online that reports some inspiring reflections on what is going on in the Social Innovation in the UK. Thanks to Redjotter for the link :)

Also, i was very impressed by the really powerful Google Translation function for webpages!

D2B2 impression

I presented a paper  in the D2B2 Design Management conference in Beijing last week and also heard a lot of very interesting speech from presentors from all over the world.  Together with the keynote speakers, there were over 50 presentations in total, covering topics from branding to sustainability to a bit of Service Design. Most of the presentations are inspiring, although I guess the use of double languages (Chinese and English) makes it a bit complex when it comes to question time. Happy that I actually benefited from both languages- ain't doing a degree abroad for nothing ;] 

One of the most impressive presentation might be James Woudhuysen's critical insights towards  Design Management by saying" design is not going to save the world, technology and science might save the world, but design can help them". I can't say that I completely agree with him, but I do admire the courage to start a contradictory argument in a conference basically show casing the benefit of design to business. However, it is true that we not only study what design can do, but also study what design cannot do. The role of design is changing, which is also true to many other professions in the world, but it doesn't mean that we can either over or under estimate what design can do. 

This reminds me of John Thackra's talk on Design Council's podcast suggests three lessons they learnt from DOTT, which might give us some thoughts on what design might become.

"

1. We are not going to innovate in the desert. It's already here. In the country our job is to discovery and accelerate the existing grass-root innovation by bring in design skills, bring in technology platforms, bring in resources s and when they are needed.

2. Build unlikely connection (innovation!) and build trust.

3. Think about how do we want to live. Start conversations at local, not telling people how they want to live. "

By the way, James Woudhuysen is having a new booking coming... Energise! it is about energy, science, and our future society. I have not read it yet though... let me know what you think if you did ;]

Silent Design

I spent las night reading this little photocopy of an article from Peter Gorb and Angela Dumas, after weeks of waiting for it to come via the Inter Library Loan from British Library... It is a report on the pilot study they did in London Business School in 1987 on how the enterprise organize itself to make best ue of design, and they proposed a very important concept in that article: Silent Design.

"[...] a great deal of design activity goes on in organizations which is not called design. It is carried out by individuals who are not called designers and who would not consider themselves to be designers. We have called this 'silent design'."

Silent Design is a key concept in my research of service design, as it describes exactly what happens during/after stakehoder's encounter with the design team.

The shame is that I only got this report on the Pilot study in the first year of their three-year project... wonder anyone knows what happened afterwards? It would be very interesting to have a look at the final results and conclusion they got for the whole project. Have anyone got any other publications from Gorb and Dumas on Silent Design around 1990s? Also I guess this report on Design Studies is out of print now as well... I have a scaned PDF copy and not sure if it is legal to spread it online... If you are looking for this report for research and learning purpose, please give me a shout here and I will email you :)

Take a Do Good Pledge!

David Berman's book Do Good Design talks about designers responsibility in repairing our world.

You can take a Do Good Pledge here:

1. I will be true to my profession.
2. I will be true to myself.
3. I will spend at least 10% of my professional time helping repair the world.

Also you can post stories of your own Do Good Design to their Flickr site: www.flickr.com/groups/dogooddesign/

I will say all the MDes projects should go on there!

I just order the book to the library, so you guys (in Dundee) should be able to find it soon when you get back to the Uni~ Happy reading~

By the way... On the front page I found something really familiar (with a smile): 做好设计不够，还需行善有益

xams reading list...

stocking up the flat with food, snacks and chocolate, and having some peaceful reading, that's the plan for this xmas... will do it in Guildford though, not Dundee this year...

The Hitchhiker's Guild to the Galaxy - I reach the restaurant at the end of the universe eventually~ also got the audio radio play from Jonathan last week... I so love the cleverness of it! well... also will get the chance to make up some 'serious' reading that I own myself due to the lovely holidays and the bloody writtings...

Innovation in the Service Economy - it is called the new wealth of the nations... guess it is pretty good then... as a economic book it is actually not really hard to read (well... it is only one chapter I have gone through so far, maybe it is still too early to say so...)

Management - an introduction to management... it is a full-colour print, a pretty book as a management literature... the book belongs to Fan, but I can have it for the two weeks... after all, it is always good to review some of the basics!

the Culture of Design - yes, I am still on it... only get to the end of Chapter 4... it gets interesting since Chapter 3, the bits about consumption ehos the bits of the customer experience in my own study...

and possibly will watch some movies as well... any recommendations?

p.s: oh... forget to take Fan's Management book with me... Jonathan made me read Tipping Point instead...

power and creativity

"... no one can give us democracy, we must learn democracy. To be democrat is not to decide on a certain form of human association, it is to learn to live with other men..." by Mary Parker Follett (re-print by Graham, 1995)

the Culture of Design

I was given this book to read in order to help out the lovely DHTP guys next year with some teaching. It was a book for the Level 3 undergraduate students to read. My job is to host seminars for discussions, linking their own design practice with the content of the book.

Going through the first three chapters, I found that Julier gives much in depth review on how design comes to shape, as an academic discipline and as an industry. His ability of weaving architecture, product design, and advertising all into the stream of design history throughout the early 30's till now is pretty impressive. This holistic view it takes can provide the students an snap shoot history of the field that they are going to step in after graduation, and it also echos the 'big design' idea we try to get through during the teaching.

However, I would not describe this book as a easy-reading... so... good luck reading :-)